[Thrawn Trilogy] - 02(100)
The Wookiee snarled impatiently.
“I don’t know what else to do,” she snapped back. “All know is that death and massive destruction won’t do anything but put us back where we were before we came here. It certainly won’t convince the Noghri that they should leave the Empire and come over to our side.”
She looked out past the cluster of huts at the distant hills and the brown kholm-grass rippling in the breeze. Glinting in the sunlight, the squat box shapes of a dozen decon droids were hard at work, scooping up a quarter cubic meter of topsoil with each bite, running it through some exotic catalytic magic in their interiors, and dumping the cleansed product out the back. Slowly but steadily bringing the people of Honoghr back from the edge of the destruction they’d faced:and a highly visible reminder, if anyone needed it, of the Empire’s benevolence toward them.
“Lady Vader,” a gravelly voice mewed from just behind her.
Leia jumped. “Good morning, maitrakh,” she said, turning and giving the Noghri a solemn nod. “I trust you are well this morning?”
“I feel no sickness,” the other said shortly.
“Good,” Leia said, the word sounding rather lame. The maitrakh hadn’t been so impolite as to say anything out loud, but it was clear enough that she considered herself to be in a no-win situation here, with dishonor and perhaps even death waiting for her family as soon as the Grand Admiral discovered what Khabarakh had done. It was probably only a matter of time, Leia knew, before she came to the conclusion that turning the intruders over to the Empire herself would be the least disastrous course still open to her.
“Your plans,” the maitrakh said. “How do they go?”
Leia glanced at Chewbacca. “We’re making progress,” she said. It was true enough, after a fashion: the elimination of every approach they’d come up with did technically qualify as progress. “We still have a long way to go, though.”
“Yes,” the maitrakh said. She looked out past the buildings. “Your droid has spent much time with the other machines.”
“There isn’t as much here for him to do as I’d thought there would be,” Leia said. “You and many of your people speak Basic better than I’d anticipated.”
“The Grand Admiral has taught us well.”
“As did my father, the Lord Darth Vader, before him,” Leia reminded her.
The maitrakh was silent a moment. “Yes,” she conceded reluctantly.
Leia felt a chill run up her back. The first step in a betrayal would be to put emotional distance between the Noghri and their former lord.
“That area will be finished soon,” the maitrakh said, pointing to the laboring decon droids. “If they finish within the next ten days, we will be able to plant there this season.
“Will the extra land be enough to make you self-sufficient?” Leia asked.
“It will help. But not enough.”
Leia nodded, feeling a fresh surge of frustration. To her, the Empire’s scheme was as blatant as it was cynical: with careful tuning of the whole decontamination process, they could keep the Noghri on the verge of independence indefinitely without ever letting them quite make it over that line. She knew it; the maitrakh herself suspected it. But as for proving it:
“Chewie, are you familiar at all with decon droids?” she asked suddenly. This thought had occurred to her once before, but she’d never gotten around to following up on it. “Enough that you could figure out how long it would take the number of droids they have on Honoghr to decontaminate this much land?”
The Wookiee growled an affirmative, and launched into a rundown of the relevant numbers clearly, the question had occurred to him, too. “I don’t need the complete analysis right now,” Leia interrupted the stream of estimates and extrapolations and rules of thumb. “Have you got a bottom line?”
He did. Eight years.
“I see,” Leia murmured, the brief flicker of hope fading back into the overall gloom. “That would have put it right about the height of the war, wouldn’t it?”
“You still believe the Grand Admiral has deceived us?” the maitrakh accused.
“I know he’s deceiving you,” Leia retorted. “I just can’t prove it.”
The maitrakh was silent for a minute. “What then will you do?”
Leia took a deep breath, exhaled it quietly. “We have to leave Honoghr. That means breaking into the spaceport at Nystao and stealing a ship.”
“There should be no difficulty in that for a daughter of the Lord Darth Vader.”
Leia grimaced, thinking of how the maitrakh had effortlessly sneaked up on them a minute ago. The guards at the spaceport would be younger and far better trained. These people must have been fantastic hunters before the Emperor turned them into his private killing machines. “Stealing a ship won’t be too hard,” she told the maitrakh, aware of just how far she was stretching the truth here. “The difficulty arises from the fact that we have to take Khabarakh with us.”